New Fiction Available:
"Stealing Thunder"
by Jeff Williamson
June 28, 2024
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New Fiction Available:
This story wouldn't have existed had it not been for a question. One of the first artists to reach out to us when we made our appeal for art donations for our upcoming Gates of Tengoku set was Jonny Talala Hinkle, a player and artist for the L5R community who along with his longtime colorist Raciel Avila Silva has contributed art to multiple published games, including Doomtown, Smash Up, and Thunderstone Quest (Facebook, Artstation). He sent over several fan pieces which he had done back before the original CCG's end, and offered that we could use them where we felt they fit. The art accompanying this post was one of those, an iconic piece depicting Yoritomo being forcibly ejected from the Celestial Heavens.
We had a strategy in the GoT set called "Desecration", which was regarding the corruption of the Shrine to Yoritomo, and I contacted Jonny asking if he minded if we used the art for that purpose. His response was the question that started this process: "Is that the GenCon 2015 World's choice?"
I fully admit, I wasn't paying much attention to the L5R tournaments at GenCon 2015. I'd just been added to the Design Team, and spent several blocks of time crushing warriors of Rokugan under heel as Fu Leng in the Siege: Clan War pods. So I'd forgotten there was an entire suite of story decisions in play for the convention. Add on top of that, the collaborative tournament wins document we had salvaged from AEG before the game's sale had recorded none of the information about those final GenCon events. We had so many unresolved story points we had looked into and designed cards for, but we had none of the GenCon 2015 information. So I did a research dive, uncovered some information about the event, and reached out to the 2015 L5R World Champion, Isaac Cynova, to clarify what I'd found.
Yoritomo Ichido chooses to use the Thirteenth Black Scroll on the kami Yoritomo
Jonny's art had been born directly of that decision, a controversial collaboration among multiple players at that final original CCG GenCon. Fortuitously, we had already written Ichido into the Onyx Lives! lore as the leader of the pro-Kanpeki faction of Mantis, and as I started reading more of the game lore, I realized there was a proper story here. So thanks, for asking the right question at the right moment.
"Stealing Thunder" is the first of our Mantis faction leader fictions leading up to GenCon 2024, now featured in the "Profiles in Thunder" section on our Fiction & Setting Information page..
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